The invention relates to a method of managing electronic documents and to a server suitable for implementing the method.
In this specification, the term “document” is used to designate any set of information representing a unit that can be considered as being indivisible and complete.
As non-limiting examples, a book, a memorandum, a report, a note, a film, and a music album are all documents in the meaning of this patent application.
For example, a document may be a multimedia document, as applies to a film.
The term “electronic document” is used to designate the representation of a document in the form of a computer data structure suitable for being stored in the memory of a computer and capable of being transmitted from one computer to another via a telecommunications network.
An electronic document may possibly correspond to an existing document on a traditional medium.
The invention relates more particularly to a secure method of managing electronic documents that makes it possible to authorize or to restrict user access to portions of said documents.
In this specification, any identifiable portion of an electronic document is referred to as a “field”.
The fields of an electronic document are defined by an administrator, a person in charge of electronic document management, or by any other user seeking to provide an electronic document that is to be managed by the method and the server of the invention.
For example, a user may decide to define the following fields: “Title”, “Header”, “Chapter”, for an electronic document obtained by scanning a traditional book.
Similarly, in a music album, it is possible to define fields for each of the pieces of music in the album.
In the present state of the art, no electronic document management method is known that is suitable for managing access to portions of electronic documents, i.e. to fields. The only access rights management systems that are known at present define rights that are applicable to entire categories of documents, or to electronic documents in full.